Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, by Tim O'Reilly

I can't believe this post got no comments yet. This is a long article but one of the best write-ups of the year. Summary follows.

The web learns. Not only by humans adding data consciously, but also by sensors. This is the hidden treasure on the mobile web. They call it the sensor revolution. Quote: "Today’s smartphones contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass)"

Data is capital, and sensors are the new way of getting data. Best quote: "Think of sensor-based applications as giving you superpowers"

There's a huge opportunity building structured data from unstructured data. Best quote: "It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two."

Another big theme is connecting real life with the searchable web. Best quote: People talk about "the Internet of Things" assume that what will get us there is the combination of ultra-cheap RFID and IP addresses for everyday objects (…). Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

Winning applications are designed to get better the more people use them

As a side note, I would encourage anyone here to learn R (www.r-project.org). Data analysis is flourishing in a world where new, interesting data is so easy to collect. Quote: "Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice."

Real-time is huge. We need machine learning to be applied here to make sense of streams of data.

Quote: "The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world." We need to solve real problems in the real world.

The article concludes with some examples: Government 2.0 (Obama champaign), crowdsourcing for personalized medicine.